Stick to Void. Everything else will look slow. Haven't moved since I started using it.

If you don't want Ubuntu, you can still have Debian. All the apt goodness without the Canonical drama.

Ever consider Gentoo?

You're going to be impressed with NixOS. You might still hate it because of the learning curve, but it offers you the ability to have both stable and nightly packages in one system.

If you mess something up, you can just boot into the previous configuration.

APK is really fast

Not a global opinion here as many hardcore linux users will stand by Arch or Mint, but I always have preferred Debian. It's what Ubuntu is based on, so it uses apt(itude), yet it's not prebloated Ubuntu and much more true to adaptation and unedited software than Ubuntu has become... But in the end it's more personal choice and taste, so usually requires a bunch of failed attempts to get one that fits, as every linux can basically do the same things, yet on some or other slightly different way... 😜

APK/Alpine is great! And the Edge repos are well stocked.

Chimera Linux seems to be using even newer apktools than Alpine, not sure what the deal with that is. But that distro is still in early stages with limited repos for now.

Pacman/makepkg/Arch is great too, and an obvious consideration for your usage, curiously omitted from your post.

I would recommend playing around with containers instead of doing a reinstall. Containers give a similar experience without so much work

apk isn't any more or less than using dpkg by itself, or opkg. As for what I use, I use Arch at home and Ubuntu on my virtual machines (because they're officially supported by my hosting provider). They work for me. I like them.

I’ve been considering Opensuse, but last time I used zypper it was painfully slow. Has it gotten any better?

No, I am using TW for years and despise its package manager slowness. Apart from that though, TW is great. Have void on my laptop as well, sadly rarely use it currently.

Alpine is great! Apk is super fast. The package selection isn't then best, but it's on-par with dnf and apt. My one gripe is musl/openrc issues, but you're already used to that if you use Void

Went with Arch and Fedora simply for the parallel downloading. I tried xbps , the only turn off for me was the fact that feature was missing otherwise void is best to stick with.